Marketing

Function (biology)

Cell biology

Workflow

Engineering

Service (business)

Biology

Virtualization

Operating system

Economics

Virtual prototyping

Computer science

Cloud computing

Distributed computing

Business

Evolutionary biology

Container (type theory)

Mechanical engineering

Simulation

Database

Rapid prototyping

Software engineering

Economy

Virtual network

Key (lock)

One of the biggest challenges for the real-world application of network function virtualization (NFV) is reducing the development complexity of both virtualized network functions (VNF) and service functions chains (SFC). This is in particular important for the upcoming 5th generation of networks in which service agility is one of the key concepts to allow quick development and integration cycles and to reduce costs. Still, the availability of tools to support VNF and service developers is limited and existing solutions mainly focus on packaging support and static validation of descriptors. To change this, we introduce <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Containernet 2.0</i> a novel, open-source NFV prototyping platform supporting the creation and local execution of complex SFCs. <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Containernet 2.0</i> is the first prototyping tool that explicitly supports hybrid SFCs composed of both container-based and virtual machine-based VNFs that are combined in a single chain. During our demonstration, the end-to-end SFC prototyping workflow, including composition, execution, and configuration, is shown.

Containernet 2.0: A Rapid Prototyping Platform for Hybrid Service Function Chains